Psychological Profile of the Long Island Serial Killer

I have never seen a detailed hypothesis about the psychology and activities of the person who killed the girls found behind Gilgo Beach. I have never read any conjecture of what exactly his system was, and why he did it. People just seem to think it is someone with an angry, violent impulse toward females, who used hookers to fulfill his impulse. I think it is a person who had a specific fetish or compulsion for dismembered limbs. And there are some things you can guess about how he operated.

He didn't work hard to make sure the girls were never found. Rather, he put their remains in a high-traffic area. He could have buried them deep, or weighted them down in the water. So he he wasn't chopping them up to make it easy to hide them, or hard to identify them. He just has a fetish for disembodied limbs. I like girls with long legs, some guys like girls with round boobs. This guy had just one short circuit in his brain. He also liked girls' parts and limbs, but his aesthetic preference, his compulsion, was for freestanding separated limbs.

He was comfortable at the beach. Jones Beach is a place where a lot of the kind of girls he killed come on weekends. They come from the Bronx and Queens and Westchester all summer. And he was local. And he would drive over to the beach on weekends, and sit in a folding chair, and look at girls' limbs. And dream of them being separated from the bodies. In the winter he probably went to strip clubs, or even the ballet.

He had some additional traits. He was comfortable with chopping up a dead person. He was capable of murder, of strangling someone. I am too much of a pansy that I don't even want to be near a dead mouse or something. But given the world has no shortage of doctors and butchers, it is probably not uncommon for a person to be comfortable chopping up a dead person. Being cold enough to strangle a girl to death is a bit sick. But there are probably a lot of people who could do it. There are only a few driven to do it, by a fetish for disembodied limbs.

People make a big deal that he called and taunted a friend or sister of some victims. But that is just normal immature guy stuff. Hey, you are Lisa's sister? You want to go on a date? No? Well then fuck you, bitch. It is not unusual to have poor social skills, and get angry and frustrated with girls who reject you. It is not unique to be angry at girls.

People from New York City call Ocean Parkway "remote." But it is a high-traffic area. You would have to be local to the place, and familiar with it, to feel comfortable dumping bodies there. Remember, this is a guy who hasn't been caught. So he is not just throwing bodies out the window in traffic. He is at least a little careful. He had to have some knowledge of the area, some familiarity, to imagine he could do it without getting caught.

The beach is also the place where he looks at girls. So he sits on the beach and develops his fantasy. And while he sits and looks at the limbs of live girls moving about on the beach and in the surf, he is comfortable and pleased with the knowledge that behind him and across the street, really only a few feet away, he has his girl collection. So this is his area, he is local.

That is why he hides the girls there. He is personalizing the beach, decorating it according to his own preferences. He is making a mockery of the popular consciousness, by surreptitiously inserting his own taboo tastes into the scenery of this popular beach. He sits smugly, knowing of his secret taboo, only a few feet away.

All over New York, train platforms have posters advertising tropical vacations. They often show a couple, or a beautiful girl, standing on a beach. And there are people who get some satisfaction from drawing mustaches on the girls in the ads. They are rebelling with a sort of subtle anger. Even sometimes in business offices, I have seen gay guys who tried to insert little gay tidbits here and there. It was sort of a passive aggressive way for them to rebel against what they perceived as a lack of acceptance of who they were.

And so the Gilgo Beach killer adds his decorations to the beach, in a secret angry rebellious way. It is sort of a mockery. The side of Ocean Parkway is probably littered with empty plastic bottles from suntan oil, and lotion, and things girls spray in their hair at the beach. And there are probably tampon applicators, and empty wine cooler bottles and water bottles, and all types of various signs of the girls who come from out of town, and make Jones Beach their home for a day.

People from out of town drive over the bridge and drink beer and throw their trash right there on the side of the road. And so too, ironically, are some of their torsos and parts also discarded, among the empty bottles of suntan oil and empty packs of Newport menthol cigarettes. So the body parts are being mingled in an intentional way with the other artifacts associated with the girls on the beach.

And this is also a way of disassociating the evidence with a local person, and associating it with crowds of strangers who could have come from anywhere. The murder evidence is psychologically connected to anonymous visitors from out of town. It is part of their trash, not in the back yard of the local who lives up the street. The live girls and the dead girls are part of a single unit, a continuum, of the girls at the beach. Two sides of a coin.

The Long Island Serial Killer is a social person, a people person. Anybody who lives in such a densely populated area and goes to the beach would have to be. And he is conscious of how he looks. He is conscious of how he looks sitting in his folding chair at the beach, with his girl collection behind him. And he gets a thrill out of keeping up appearances while secretly getting away with what is forbidden to him.

If anything, the burlap sacks are an homage to the Cleveland Head Hoarder of the 1930's. Of course Gilgo expected them to be found quickly, in such a high-traffic area.

The thing about young female hookers, is they lack life skills. And they have vaginas and can produce money. There are a lot of guys who want a vagina and some money, and have life skills. And the hookers are also not too picky, and somewhat romantic. For whatever reason, hookers of the age and appearance of those found on Gilgo Beach, generally have a guy following not too far behind. Whether he is a boyfriend, a pimp, or just a fellow traveler. They need guys. They have a symbiotic relationship with a guy who is part of their life and usually close by.

A lot of serial killers take advantage of hookers. And I can't remember ever reading a story of a pimp who caught or interrupted or interfered with a serial killer in any way. So it may be that pimps just let the girls go. But I don't think the Gilgo Beach killer would want to take that chance or count on that. I think the Gilgo Beach killer met enough hookers, to know that there is usually a guy following not too far behind. Even though the pimp is often kept secret, lurking and keeping watch in the shadows. And Gilgo would want to completely separate the girls from that guy, or make sure there was no guy around a particular hooker, before he killed her.

The way he would do that, is pick them up at Massapequa Station on the Long Island Railroad. He works in the city like so many in the area, and commutes. And that is where he first meets his hookers fom the Bronx and Queens. He calls their ad and says come meet me at a midtown bar on Friday afternoon. And when he meets them, he asks if they would be willing to come out to Long Island the next day if he provides train fare and picks them up at the station. He finds girls who like the beach, and are familiar with the area. They have used public transportation to get to Jones Beach before, taking the Long Island Railroad to Freeport Station and then catching the bus.

When the train arrives at Massapequa Station, he sits in his car and watches the doors open, and locates the girl stepping out. And he watches that she steps out alone. And he waits until all the other passengers clear off the platform, and she is standing all alone. And there is no pimp tagging along. And only then does he get out of his car and say "Hey, I'm John, let's go."

And maybe they go to the beach, maybe that is agreed to be part of the date. The girl knows Jones Beach. That is where her friends go. That is where people who know her might see her. And she doesn't want to be seen with a customer. And the Gilgo Beach killer doesn't want to be seen with her and recognized either. So they go to a more remote section of beach that I never heard of before, Gilgo Beach. That is where on many days the Long Island Serial Killer has sat, and fantasized about stalking and snatching one of the girls alone on that remote section of beach, and separating her limbs to fulfill his aesthetic preference.

On this day, he has brought a sack lunch to the buffet. On this day, he will get to chop up one of the girls on the beach. So he picks her up at Massapequa Station, and they spend an awkward hour or two on Gilgo Beach. Then they drive back to his house for the money shot, and he chops her up. And takes her back to the beach, to be included forever in his girl collection.

So you are basically looking for a local guy who works in the city, and invited dozens of hookers to come meet him alone at the train station and go to the beach in the summer. And from a huge initial pool, only a tiny handful made it the whole way through to his beach collection.

Earlier and Later Victims

According to Clarissa Cole, there are two sets of girls in the same place. The first are chopped up. And then there are whole bodies from years later, mainly of very short girls. Cole thinks this means two different killers. And it also does not fit with a limb fetish, which to me is a primary behavior, not a way of avoiding victim identification.

Some say serial killers' personalities don't change. But guys' physical sexual preferences definitely change. One of the hottest girls I ever met was 14 years old, when I was 13. Today she would look like a silly child to me. Guys' impulses towards females with different physical features change as the guys age. Gilgo may have had a fetish for just the limbs as a young man. But he came to appreciate the whole female body as he matured.

The part about the recent short-girl stories that doesn't make sense to me, is the supposedly close interaction between the killer and the pimps. In the case of Amber Lynn Costello, as is typical, the customer communicated with the hooker on the pimp's phone at his home. In the case of Megan Waterman, the pimp was potentially a few feet away when the killer picked the girl up at her motel.

You cannot hope to find a hooker unicorn who is both 4'11" and doesn't have a pimp. If your plan was to kill the hooker you would need some strategy to separate the hooker from the pimp. You would need to be confident the pimp wasn't shadowing the hooker, or communicating with her surreptitiously on a hidden clamshell phone.

The stories I have read do not hint at how the killer made sure the pimp didn't screen him when he drove up, or write down the license plate of his car. Even for a $1500 all-night date, and perhaps more likely with an interesting big-money customer, the pimp might be likely to try to follow after and wait around the corner in hopes to sneak some quick up-front or deposit money to buy drugs.

So there is something missing. Maybe this was the killer's second date with the hooker. Maybe the girls were hiding something from the pimps. Maybe the killer is just reckless and got lucky. You don't think those pimps got irritated when they were expecting some rent money and didn't get it? You don't think they spent the next day investigating where their rent money went? The more money is involved, the closer attention the pimp is going to pay. What kind of car does a guy drive, who pays $1500 to screw a short girl?

It is not plausible to me that these girls would go all alone with a guy they never met, either by being picked up, or traveling a long distance without a pimp or driver. Because they would have literally no expectation of getting paid. They say serial killers are charming. But there are 100's of guys who aren't serial killers who are also charming, and waste the time of hookers calling them all day. These girls get literally hundreds of calls from guys who like to talk and never pan out. Hookers don't believe anyone.

Megan Waterman is not going to be talked into walking up the street and being driven somewhere, by a stranger she never met. Otherwise she would be walking up the street and getting into strangers' cars and never getting paid, literally all day. The time and the money for a girl to take a train out to Long Island or ride out there with a stranger who picks her up, she could be meeting 5 guys right where she is. She is absolutely not going to give a guy a chance to waste her time like that, unless she knows him. Otherwise guys would be wasting her time and she would spend her life on wild goose chases and on guys who backed out, or just knocked her down and took her money or left without paying or whatever.

There are a million guys on Long Island who won't strangle a girl, but will leave her in a strange place with no money. It's true the girls can just walk down the street and flag down the first guy who drives by for a ride home. They have no fear of violence. They have an aggressive fear of poverty, and of being used. There may only be a rare customer who will strangle a girl. But there are millions of guys who will never pay the girl, they probably account for 95% of calls. The strategy girls always use to avoid guys who will waste their time and never pay them, will also make it harder for those same strangers to kill them.

The bodies on Gilgo Beach all had pimps or security companions of some sort, and got killed the one time they went out alone. They already knew the guy. They knew he didn't like pimps around, which is common among customers. So maybe they led the customer on to believe they didn't have pimps or boyfriends or whatever. And the girls knew the customer paid big, and the girls maybe did not want to share it with their pimps or drivers because they thought they didn't need the security.

But the fact they all had companions may be why they ended up where they did. Because the moment they were dead, the killer went into their phone and saw they had a pimp or boyfriend he didn't know about, who might have seen him or would come looking for him. The bitches did have a pimp, they lied to him. So he didn't have time to chop up the bodies and play with them. When he saw in their phone they had people who might have seen him, he dumped the bodies whole as quickly as possible. There are probably other girls who really did fly solo, and he took his time to chop them up and throw their parts all over the eastern end.

It seems likely that for some of the chopped-up girls, nobody was even looking for them. The girls who were dumped whole, we know their phones lit up as soon as they were dead. Or in the case of Amber Costello, the killer found out it wasn't even her phone. That, and not any change in habit, is what caused him to dump the four whole girls quickly.

In the case of Melissa Barthelemy, the killer was worried the sister Amanda might have actually met him. The killer was calling her to try to figure out if she might know who he was. The killer may have actually met Kritzia, or Fabulous if Fabulous was dark-skinned like Amanda. So the killer is possibly somebody Melissa had a threesome with.

Porn Shoot Theory

When Maureen Brainard-Barnes called porn Al and said she had been robbed of $5k, that doesn't mean she was robbed of $5k. She is just too embarrassed or too smart of a negotiator, to call and say "I'm a broke loser and no guys will talk to me, I am desperate to do a porn shoot for quick cash." So instead she calls and says "I am Miss Thing, I have money to the ceiling, only I just got robbed. So this is your one chance to get me to do a porn shoot."

This was after Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton got famous with their sex tapes. Every young girl where I lived in South Beach wanted to do a sex tape. Guys knews this, and offered the possibility of maybe getting paid $1000 to do a sex tape, to lure girls. So it is very likely Maureen and the other girls would have had a positive reaction to guys who talked about making sex tapes for money.

But another thing these girls all had in common is they had familes, children, brothers, and sisters. They wouldn't want their families to know about or see them in a porn video. So they would have been willing to walk around a corner, or take extra steps, to keep any porn shoot secret from people they knew. So it is possible when Al didn't bite on Maureen's hint, she contacted another person who had asked to do a sex tape, on Long Island, to see if the offer was still good.

Amber Lynn Costello didn't mention any video to Dave Schaller when she sneaked out into the night for $1500. But it is something she might have wanted to keep secret from her family. Similarly Megan Waterman might not have wanted Vybe to know about her doing porn, because she didn't want to share the money or her friends to find out. So maybe she called Vybe to make sure he wasn't coming home anytime soon, before sneaking out to do a video.

Atlantic City

I theorized LISK may have moved to Atlantic City after the bodies were found at Gilgo. There are many similarities to the west end of Long Island. I was therefore rewarded by the discovery that one of his first victims, Valerie Mack, was from Atlantic City. I know his mind. Atlantic County has great beaches, and is a good place to do what he does.

Maybe he first came up with the idea on a trip to Atlantic City. I remember seeing some really awful hookers on the Atlantic City boardwalk outside the casinos. I assume there were also some pretty ones all over the casinos, and some young short ones. I would not have even noticed or recognized them as hookers, because I was not looking for hookers, nor hookers for me.

But if Gilgo wanted those short little legs, he could have called one back to the Golden Sands motel, and strangled her. And then chopped her up, so he could carry her out to his car perfectly concealed in suitcases.

First he got rid of the torso, which was of no appeal to him, in Manorville. Then he got rid of the identifying parts at Gilgo. Based on the several articles I have read, he still has one complete short leg of Valerie Mack. The Halsey Road remains are called a torso. If really only a head and hands were missing, wouldn't they call that a body with the head cut off? A headless corpse? A head being cut off is very shocking, unless it really is just a torso. If there were an entire leg and foot attached, that would be a body not a torso. And it does not make sense Gilgo would transport such a large single piece. Unless he likes the whole body.

Perhaps he originally stalked joggers on Halsey Manor Road. Putting a body there was his way of saying look, I got one just like you! He would not want people to find out he was only able to get hookers, and normal people were not in danger.

No Mystery. John Bittrolff is the Long Island Serial Killer.

In 2002, there was a CSI episode about "The Blue Paint Killer" who stalked girls on a remote path. I often found out that CSI stories were inspired by real news stories. There is not much hope to find out what real story may have inspired the CSI episode. But it would have happened around the time when it could have also inspired whoever left Valerie Mack on that path in Manorville.

Valerie Mack was not stalked on a path, she was perhaps strangled in a motel room. But the killer did not want you to know she was really a person with tattoos, a hooker from Atlantic City. The killer wanted her to look like she could have been one of the girls who jogged along that path by the highway in Manorville.

I believe the killer had seen females jogging alone on that path. And he wanted to kill them for sport. Or he at least wanted them to know that he could have killed them for sport. Maybe there was some reason he could not actually kill the one he wanted to kill, because he knew her. He was afraid to kill someone he knew. But he still wanted to terrorize her. So he found someone who could pass as her if you cut the head and tattoos off, and put the body on the path where the person he knew would see her. It was intended to say "look, this could be you."

So the killer was someone who was intrigued by the idea of stalking prey on a remote path. John Bittrolff was a hunter, who also had no problem chopping up dead animals. John Bittrolff lived in Manorville and, as a hunter, would have been curious to walk that path. And John Bittrolff had forbidden impulses, so we know he had forbidden impulses toward the girls he would have seen jogging on that path. But we know he couldn't kill a local because he knew them, and John Bittrolff was a local to that path.

So whoever put Valerie Mack on that path had a specific female walker or jogger in mind, as the target of his display. Yes it is weak to quote Hannibal Lecter, but "How do we begin to covet? We begin by coveting what we see every day." That female had to live in Manorville, so the person who made the display for her to see, must also live in Manorville, to know of her. The chances that there are two hooker killers in such a small town, is basically zero.

Part of my analysis is that the killer liked the physical shapes of females. A carpenter like John Bittrolff takes interest in physical shapes.